While most teams in college football already have three games under their belts to begin the 2025 season, Washington only have two - taking an unusual early bye week after its September 6 win at home against UC Davis. Typically scheduled for the middle of the season to give the team a rest, oftentimes before a big game, what does it mean now that the Huskies had one before conference play even starts?
There's two ways of thinking about how a team might perform following a bye week: one, it either helps offset some of the wear and tear on players and gives the coaching staff an extra week to game plan for the next opponent, leading to better results in the game after. Or two, the time off makes players rusty, and the team they're playing against has an advantage with more recent in-game experience.
Since 2015, it's been a mixed bag for previous Washington teams. In the game coming immediately after the first bye week of the season, the Huskies are 5-4, with coach Jedd Fisch's squad most recently losing to Indiana last season following a late-October bye week.
Every single one of these bye weeks occurred around mid-October, and they were most commonly scheduled before the rivalry matchup against the Oregon Ducks (2018, 2019, 2021, 2023). In these instances, again, it's hard to say if the bye week did or didn't help - the Huskies went 2-2 in those contests. However, the 2023 matchup against Oregon did result in one of the biggest wins in program history.
Still, with no clear advantage from having a bye week, it's scary to think about having one so early into this season, especially following a game where the Huskies put up 70 points and looked sharp from top to bottom. You don't want the momentum from a game like that to be slowed down, and you also now have to play nine weeks in a row with no breaks for the rest of the season. With an expanded Big Ten conference, travel for East Coast games may be even more brutal.
Perhaps this could be yet another factor to consider going into the heated rivalry matchup against Washington State tomorrow evening in the 117th Apple Cup. It will be interesting to see if UW maybe gets out to a bit of a slow start after not being in a highly-competitive atmosphere for so long, or if they come out firing on all cylinders after an extra week to refresh and prepare.
Either way, the result will say a lot about the Huskies' team identity this season.